In order to sustain life and perform activities of daily living in a household or a place of business, people need various resources such as electricity, gas, water, and hot water. It is much more economical to produce these resources in special equipment and to provide to a household or a place of business rather than to individually produce the resources. Accordingly, a company managing equipment producing these resources installs a meter in a consuming place to measure an amount of resource provided to the consuming place and charges a rate according to a measured value. When there are many meters installed in consuming places, it is inappropriate that a person (i.e., a meter man) checks measured values and states of meters one by one to charge rates because of personnel expenditure and inaccurate meter reading. To solve these problems, various remote meter-reading systems have been proposed.
In a conventional remote meter-reading system, a wireless modem for remote meter-reading receives a measured value from an electronic meter at a predetermined time, packetizes the measured value into a predetermined format, and transmits packets to a remote meter-reading server through a backbone network such as a mobile communication network. However, in one-sided communication using such packet data transmission, the packets may not be transmitted to the remote meter-reading server due to a fault such as a poor state of the mobile communication network.
Remote meter-reading may not be accurately performed due to such fault, thereby decreasing reliability of the remote meter-reading system. This may be a serious blow to spread of the remote meter-reading system.